


on a clear day

by Confabulatrix



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Declarations Of Love, F/M, Family Feels, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Operation Pitfall (Pacific Rim), Radiation Sickness, probable medical inaccuracies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 16:12:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5504273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Confabulatrix/pseuds/Confabulatrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Befores, and afters. What changed the war and what came after it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	on a clear day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jocelyn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jocelyn/gifts).



> Along the way, this kind of turned into a mix of both prompts - I hope you like it!

Saving the world has its perks. Hot showers. Sweetheart cakes and egg tarts in the mess line. _Painkillers_. Those are all nice enough, but after the overbearingly loud helicopter ride back to Hong Kong, Raleigh finds himself most invested in the soft pillows on the extra wide hospital bed Dr. Xie expects him to share with Mako.

Mako's headache and his queasy exhaustion and the weight of their combined losses guarantees the impossibility of anything untoward, but Raleigh still feels a little like a kid sneaking cookies as he slides into bed at Mako's side. Mako turns her face into his shoulder, frowning against the dim infirmary lights, and it's all Raleigh can do not to curl into her immediately in response.

The doctor laughs at him while a nurse starts his IV line. “I have been this 'dome's CMO for nine years, and post-drop Velcro-ing has been standard procedure since the Weis' first deployment,” she says. “I would worry if you didn't want to be near one another.” She sticks around a few more minutes to monitor their vitals, then gives them instructions to call for anything they need and dims the lights further. “Sleep well, Rangers. You did well today.”

Mako hums the quietest acknowledgment into Raleigh's shoulder, and pulls away the slightest bit while he shifts for a closer, more comfortable position without pulling at the IV in the back of his right hand. Once he's settled, she rests her head against his chest, close enough to hear his heartbeat, and slides her hand up his arm to clutch loosely at the extra fabric over his shoulder.

Raleigh tries not to think about how easy it'd be to get used to this, but he's asleep before he can finish the not-thought. Around oh-dark-hundred though, he wakes with a headache, a tight burning feeling in his sinuses, and a grief thick enough in his lungs to drown him. Mako tries to stifle her sobs with his shirt, for what good that does. He thinks maybe he should say something, but he's never been that good with words, and for all that he feels it too, this pain doesn't belong to him.

While he was sleeping, his left arm slid under Mako's pillow, and his right hand migrated to her waist. It's easy enough now to draw her into an embrace, to cup the back of her head in his left hand and to slide his right hand up and under her sleep shirt to settle between her shoulder blades. He traces small circles against her skin with his fingertips while she gradually takes control of her hiccoughing breaths, and he's just starting to drowse off that way again when she murmurs “Sumimasen” into his chest.

“S'okay,” he mumbles, “I've got you now.”

All things considered, it's the best night of sleep he's had in years. Waking up is a different story.

 _Everything_ hurts. Raleigh's entire body might as well be a giant bruise, and his skin's radiating nearly enough heat to set the bed on fire. Everywhere his skin touches Mako's burns even hotter, which is just peachy, given how closely intertwined they are.

He takes a moment to be profoundly grateful they were given scrubs to wear instead of loose hospital gowns. He groans, and says, “ _Owwwwwwww_.”

Mako quakes against him with laughter. “So eloquent, Mr. Becket.”

He cranes his neck to look at her and thinks, _Ohhhhhh I am in so much trouble_. “Nice sunburn, Miss Mori.”

She glances down at the reddened skin on her arm and shrugs. “You should see yours, Mr. Becket.”

He gingerly frees his right arm from beneath her shirt, and winces at the movement and the color. “Jeez. That can't be healthy.” He lifts the hem of his shirt to see how far down the nuclear flush goes and laughs when Mako conspicuously turns her head and her gaze away. Laughing hurts, but he can't help it, especially when her face goes a shade pinker than it already is.

“Really, Mako, _really_?” He's been in her head enough to know what she thinks of him, and she can pretend modesty all she likes right now, but it's her fingers playing at his nape, and her ankle hooked behind his knee.

She's spared from any response beyond a pouting expression when the infirmary lights go up and Tendo comes in, carrying a tablet, mugs, and a carafe of what smells like coffee.

“Rise and shine, Rangers! How's it feel to be the saviors of the planet?”

To that, Mako makes an inelegant noise. Raleigh wants to ask her who's the eloquent one now, but he's too busy trying to untangle his limbs and sensors and tubes from hers. Tendo pointedly says nothing to their slow undignified scramble, but his expression speaks volumes as he takes a seat.

“What time is it?”

“0900, give or take. Doc said to let you sleep as long as you needed, but you got nineteen hours and if your brains aren't fried we could really use some relief hitters in LOCCENT.”

Mako accepts the cup Tendo pours for her; Raleigh declines. The coffee smells great, but his stomach rolls in disagreement with the idea. Tendo shrugs and takes a long swig.

“How is Mr. Han—the Marshall?”

Tendo sags back into his chair. Raleigh wonders if he's slept at all since they resurfaced. “Herc spent a few hours in quarters, but he's been out and upright since the kites went up last night. Dunno how he's doing it. He called Dr. Schoenfeld a few hours ago.”

Tendo asks Mako a technical question that might as well be in Cantonese for all Raleigh understands it, but he's still hung up on an earlier point.

He accidentally interrupts Mako's answer to ask, “What did you mean about kites?”

 

 

2020, Los Angeles

 

The Gage brothers are the last Rangers to make a promotional appearance in their dress blacks. It's a PR decision, pushed through to the top after the public outcry over Coyote Tango's abrupt retirement comes to a head. Coyote Tango was an enormously popular Jaeger, and it proves improbably difficult to explain to the public that the pilot teams are neither interchangeable, nor easily replaceable. Thus, into the back of every pilot's closet goes the SDU, and out come the band t-shirts, flight suits and customized bomber jackets.

There's a two-hour special on ABC, about day-to-day life in the LA 'dome. Bruce and Trevin take America on a tour, from quarters to common crew areas, even to the inside of Romeo Blue's conn-pod. Pilot interviews take place in the Rec Room; during the interview with Jaeda Carter and Faris Rhodes of Mammoth Apostle, Jesus Ramos absolutely schools Yancy Becket in chess, and a hilarious trilingual pissing match ensues.

Hours of supplemental footage hit Youtube after that, including boxing practice with Warden Aurora's pilots. The comment section blows up over Justin Kohler's brutal right hook, and there are dozens of comparison gifsets layering the practice hit over the one that got so much media replay five months earlier when Warden Aurora and Danger took down Yamarashi.

Rangers become rock stars. The world forgets the black uniforms, and the names of the pilots become synonymous with the names of their Jaegers.

Yancy Becket dies at 2:46 am on a Saturday morning, somewhere in the Gulf of Alaska, and even after Danger stumbles ashore just north of Nikiski almost seven hours later, everyone assumes his brother will follow him shortly. Brass drags its feet in releasing any information, but Ranger lines of communication move almost as quickly as thought.

Raleigh Becket is still in surgery when, at 12:00 pm local time, the pilots of Shatterdome Los Angeles march out to the parade grounds in their dress blacks and stand vigil. It's 11:00 am in Anchorage, 3:00 pm in Panama City and Lima; 4:00, 5:00, 6:00 and 7:00 am in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Vladivostok and Sydney, respectively, but the Rangers step out as one in their shared grief and funereal blacks.

 

 

The kites stay aloft the entire week following Pitfall. It's understandable; the Weis were a much beloved fixture in Hong Kong, and the Kaidanovskies died in the city's defense. Raleigh doesn't necessarily understand the reasoning, but he appreciates the sentiment. There could be worse ways to pay one's respects to the honored dead, he just wishes he didn't have to see the twist of anguish on Mako's face every time she looks out a window.

On the eighth day without a kaiju attack, the world seems to catch its collective breath, and the first wave of the media onslaught breaks over the 'dome. What's left of the PPDC's PR department holds the line, but it's a temporary measure while the world clamors for answers.

In the meantime, Tendo almost has a nervous breakdown trying to find Raleigh a dress uniform. Herc's the right height, but hasn't worn blacks since he promoted to Deputy Marshall in Sydney four years ago. Chuck threw his into Sydney Harbor piece-by-piece after Strowler Fire and Vulcan Spectre went down. Sasha and Aleksis both supposedly brought theirs to Hong Kong, but they stopped wearing them a year ago, choosing instead to walk out wearing Cherno's metal skin, and their crew proves weirdly defensive on the matter.

Eventually, someone in Personnel with better Cantonese than Tendo's finds an available tailor in the city, Mako negotiates with Crimson Typhoon's crew, and they assemble Raleigh's SDU piecemeal from the magnificently tailored uniforms the Weis left behind.

Raleigh doesn't care about the uniform, and doesn't care to wear it, but Tendo insists, and since Tendo's basically running the 'dome while Herc roams the corridors like a hollow ghost, Raleigh accedes.

The tailor pokes disapprovingly at Raleigh's ribs, and breaks out his measuring tape with a string of words Mako declines to translate for Raleigh's benefit, but he does excellent work, and quickly. He returns a few days later with the finished uniform, as well as to adjust the fit on Mako's, and finds Raleigh's jacket still hangs a little loosely. The tailor's not the only one displeased with that fact.

“In conclusion, you are an idiot,” Dr. Xie informs him, after going over his blood work in terms he can't understand. “As a person, I am grateful for your actions, but as your physician, I say you are foolhardy to a degree of absurdity I cannot begin to comprehend.” She uses more words, like 'absorbed dose' and 'latency period' and 'hematopoietic syndrome,' but the only part he really hears is when the doctor says he worries her more than Mako does.

Neither of them have had an appetite for much of anything since Pitfall, but Raleigh had been hoping Mako's disinterest in eating would subside along with her grief. She marches tall and resolved and determined through each day, but each night since that first one in the infirmary, she's let that resolve go to pieces and collapsed against him in his quarters. There's _too much_ in her room, too many reminders of her losses and the people she loved before the kaiju stole them away from her.

Raleigh understands that well enough, it's why he ran from Anchorage when he did, but Mako's stronger than he is and she's lost more than he has and she deserves better than to sicken and grow brittle, especially now, of all possible times.

He can barely bring himself to ask Dr. Xie, and her answer isn't as comforting as he'd like. “It will get worse before it improves. Ranger Mori received less exposure than you did, she is younger than you are, and unlike you, she was not already anemic, nor did she have so many vitamin deficiencies that—” Dr. Xie stops herself and gives him a baleful look.

“ _Her_ prognosis is very good. Yours should be as well, but we will have to wait and see.”

Raleigh's heard that too many times, ' _wait and see_ ' from his mother's doctors before she got really sick, and how many times over the last ten years did Mako hear the word 'prognosis,' anyway?

He doesn't have an answer for that until a few days later, when he's across the hall gathering up the last of Mako's wardrobe and a few of her notebooks. Raleigh tries to ignore the fact he's carrying an armful of undergarments, until a bra strap catches one of the tools on the edge of Mako's desk and sends it clattering to the floor. He bends to retrieve it with a sigh, and spies a crumpled half-folded paper crane in the bin below Mako's desk.

A scrap of memory flickers in, of uncomfortable plastic chairs and colorful washi paper under fluorescent lights, and with it, a sense of numbers: 286, 714, 532, 110. She never had enough time to reach a thousand, and didn't dare risk not beginning anew each time.

Raleigh feels the itch of _knowing_ in his fingers and thinks, faced suddenly with the future he never expected to have, he has all the time in the world.

 

 

2020, Anchorage

 

Ranger lines of communication move almost as quickly as thought.

Before Marshall Pentecost watches his Rangers fall into step and come back in from the cold, the word's out to the old guard that Pentecost needs a reliever and a cover for the next thirty-six hours, whether Becket keeps breathing or not. Arrangements are made and schedules cleared. Lightcap takes the first helicopter from Kodiak and takes the rest of the second shift while Schoenfeld's Deputy Marshall in LA schedules her connecting flights north.

When Stacks pulls up to Tamsin's place on Sand Lake's south shore, she's waiting on the front porch for him, wearing a bathrobe and plaid flannel pajama bottoms. Tams tips him a salute with a bottle of Gordon's, and Stacks turns his phone off for the first time in four years.

What happens after that is—

Three months after Knifehead, Gunnar and Vic Tunari ship out to Tokyo to run with Coyote Tango, and try not to think their deployment is cursed. Sevier and Pentecost were Coyote's team from day one, and for all that the engineers promise the buffers were purged and scrubbed, every once in a while something comes up in the drift that doesn't belong to Vic and isn't Gunnar's either.

They ignore it as long as they can, apply logic to superstition: a place can't be haunted by someone who's still alive, but both of them keep dreaming about someone named Luna. Word gets out, like it always does, so when Vic gets an email from tsevier@sd.tok.ppdc, he's not entirely surprised.

Coyote Tango goes down for good on a clear day in November, 2022. Two days later, Stacker shows up on the back porch of Tams' pension-paid Oahu beach house with a fifth of good scotch and two bottles of terrible coconut rum.

"Nice view," he says, passing the scotch. "Could think of worse places to go out."

Tams tips the brim of her straw hat up with the neck of the bottle and tips a salute to his ugly tourist-bait Hawaiian shirt. "'d'rather go in a Jaeger, 'n you would too." She takes a pull off the bottle and passes it back to him. "Was it at least fast?"

"Yeah."

"Good."

 

 

February proves a rough month.

It begins promisingly enough. Alison braves the two connecting flights and eighteen hours in-air from her mother's house in Nanaimo with a two-year-old in potty training and comes through still happy to see Tendo at the end of it. Another of Tendo's worries proves unfounded when Harry not only recognizes him from their monthly vidchats, but is thrilled to see him. (" _Fantastic_ ," Alison says. "He usually hates everyone. You got this long enough for me to take a nap?")

Herc makes an attempt to rejoin the living so Tendo can take the time to be with his family, and that too goes better than anyone anticipated. Harry likes Max even more than he likes lychee ice cream and the word 'no,' and his admiration transfers bit by bit to Max's constant companion. Herc says he's glad to see Max making a friend, but given how many years the dog acted as proxy between Chuck and him, everyone understands what he really means.

Dr. Gottlieb also receives the happy news in from London that his wife Vanessa went into labor and he's now father to a healthy baby girl; he catches the first commercial flight out that same day, and the K-Sci corridor has its first quiet week in over two years.

Good things and good moods all 'round, except that the clock finally runs out on Mako and Raleigh's post-exposure latency period. What manifests as a sniffle and some fussiness in Harry Choi becomes a full upper respiratory crisis for both of them. Dr. Xie quarantines them to the infirmary on a regimen of IV fluids and antivirals, but both of their compromised immune systems bow to pneumonia anyway.

The situation takes a turn for the comically awful when Mako proves allergic to the antibiotic and Raleigh experiences the most embarrassing side effect possible.

Raleigh thanks God for HIPAA after the infirmary staff help him into a shower and clothes and back into bed. "You are never gonna think I'm sexy again," he groans into Mako's shoulder.

"I have hives _everywhere_ ," Mako replies, still hoarse from her earlier coughing fit. "If you scratch that place on my back where I can't reach, I will forget it ever happened."

"I love you," Raleigh says, and realizes abruptly he means it.

Mako stills in front of him for a small eternity, and when she exhales it's with the slightest laugh. "Of course you do. I am the best thing that's ever happened to you."

It's kind of her to give him an out, but Raleigh's never been one to half-ass anything, up to and apparently including ill-timed declarations of love. "You are," he agrees.

 

 

2020, Hong Kong

 

The first kites go up in Manila, a couple days after the PPDC releases the news on Yancy Becket. Cheung sees them in a video posted on Weibo, a bunch of kids in Rizal Park sending up kites high enough to be seen from the bay. One kid says it's a send-off for the Ranger who helped save their city four months ago. Hu watches the video over Cheung's shoulder with the sound off and makes a thoughtful noise in his throat.

"Looks like they're challenging the kaiju, doesn't it?" he says. "Daring them to come for Manila again."

As a visual metaphor, the idea... actually, yeah, it works really well. Cheung likes the idea of spitting in the kaiju's eyes.

"If we do this," he says, "we'll need more kites."

"Oh no," Hu says, dryly. "We live in China. Wherever will we find enough kites?"

It becomes a game, for few years, played between Jaeger teams after each kill. Hong Kong's kites are of course the most magnificent, but the Russians are dirty cheaters and saboteurs (and okay, maybe the Weis are bitter they didn't think of using fireworks first, so they attribute the idea to Yuna and So-Yi).

And then Shaolin Rogue falls, and Nova Hyperion. The game seems self-serving once they're the only ones left to play it.

 

 

By the time Mako's blood work has come back acceptably hale and healthy and well, Raleigh's finished 153 wobbly, lopsided origami cranes. With that first wish already granted, he could just give up, call it done and forfeit the rights to a lifetime allotment of papercuts, _except_.

Before Pitfall, he told Mako he'd never really thought about the future, and now he knows he had no idea then what he was talking about. It was easier, then, to face the idea of a suicide mission before he'd had a taste of what his future could be.

Mako smiles when he kisses her. She likes sleeping in on Saturdays. She wants two dogs, and to split time between her family's house on Tanegashima and wherever it is he wants to call home, she's not opposed to marriage if he'd ask her, and she's getting better and he...

In April, Dr. Xie assures him that she's never seen an autologous bone marrow transplant not take, and that she need only contact the facility in Anchorage storing the cell line they took from him in 2016, in accordance with the standing PPDC policy for the pilots of nuclear Jaegers. Raleigh doesn't have the heart to tell her that he was a minor for most of that year, and Yance'd been excluded from the list by virtue of that stupid tattoo he got to impress his girlfriend.

By the time Raleigh was old enough to donate, they were building non-nuclear Jaegers, and like hell were they gonna undergo a painful and probably unnecessary medical procedure that probably wouldn't work if they needed it anyway. Yancy had done it three years earlier for their mom, and look how that had turned out.

While Dr. Xie makes inquiries that will come to nothing, Raleigh looks up statistics on finding a matching donor in the post-kaiju world and thinks, a little angrily, of how Pentecost asked him where he'd rather die before he'd found a reason to live.

 

 

2025, Hong Kong

 

As they descend into the Pacific, Mako drifts in the memory of a clear day and thinks about Yancy Becket.

Before she chose Danger for the restoration project, she'd courted the idea of restoring Coyote Tango instead. She weighed the damages to each Jaeger, their specs, and the availability of replacement parts and equipment as impartially as she could, in acknowledgment of her bias. On every front Coyote was a superior prospect, until she accessed the report on Coyote's final deployment.

Previous mission reports made by the Tunaris contained a number of redactions, like there was something they had intentionally edited out. The final report was a simple transcript from Coyote's quantum recorder and thus contained no such edits.

At 3:21:14, some sort of interference locked Gunnar's cradle for a fraction of a second, just before he was able to throw a punch. At 3:21:16, he toggled out of alignment to look at Vic, who nodded.

At 3:21:17, Vic said aloud, off LOCCENT comms, "It's okay. We'll take you with us."

At 3:21:20, both Tunaris went deep into a R.A.B.I.T. Two seconds later, Coyote Tango made its last hit. One and a half seconds after that, the recording ended.

Mako chose Danger and somehow never thought of that troubling final recording again, until the moment two days ago that she found herself drifting with Yancy Becket's memory.

Raleigh wouldn't know it, because he fled Anchorage before the rule was codified and passed among Rangers as scripture, but it's a principle Mako holds dear: no one goes alone.

So now she thinks of Yancy Becket, dragged alone and terrified from the Conn-pod, and whispers to the slips and shards of him left behind, _Don't worry. We'll take you with us._

 

 

A month passes, then two, then four. Raleigh's hands learn to form hope into a habit, and his cranes gradually improve. At six months, with no surviving donors yet found on the registry, he finishes his seven hundredth crane and says to hell with it. On a lazy Saturday morning in, he traces a question around Mako's third finger, and carries her answer as a shield against hopelessness.

In the seventh month, a week and a day before Raleigh's twenty-seventh birthday, Tendo takes a call in LOCCENT that sends him running for the infirmary. Mako is folding the 950th crane and humming while he slowly, shakily works on 951. The gust from the door swinging open sends their newly folded pile flying, and into the disarray Tendo says, "You are the luckiest son of a bitch alive."

They finish the thousandth crane with just a handful of days left to the year since he first started. There's less reason to rush, but he feels like he owes it to Yancy for saving him time and time over again, to do this one thing right in return.

Recovery doesn't come overnight, and as it turns out, a thousand paper cranes take up a lot of space. Inspiration comes on a clear day with a good wind, and Mako winks at him when she says, "I have a plan."

Raleigh complains at the amount of time it takes to thread a line through each and every crane, but he considers the trade-off worth it when they send their kite and its tail of wishes aloft from the roof of the 'dome, and he cuts the line to set it free.

"What happens now?" Raleigh asks. He's not so young as to think there's a happily ever after, tied up tidily with a bow, but he's not so old as to think there's nothing left to look forward to. 

Mako grins at him and says, "We  _live_ ."


End file.
